AdKeeper Aims To Keep Advertisers By Appealing To Publishers

Having convinced a number of major marketers to give interactive ad clipping service AdKeeper a try before its full launch in August, the company’s founder Scott Kurnit is now working on securing deals with publishers to reserve a spot on their sites for his “keeper box.” So if you haven’t seen one yet, that should change over the next few weeks, as AOL (NYSE: AOL), NBC Universal (NSDQ: CMCSA), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) MSN and Forbes begin to sport Adkeeper placements on their sites.

So far, media buyers still seem skeptical about the business — do consumers really want to save ads for later? and is it worth paying a premium to find out? — but Adkeeper is taking it slow and concentrating more on the marketers and publishers now; ad agencies will follow later, assuming it all works out as planned.

As Mediapost reported, Adkeeper estimates that it has about 20 percent of the available Internet advertising inventory under contract, including Pepsi, which committed 100 percent of its ads beginning in May.

“Launch partners have committed a minimum of 15 percent of inventory to get going-forward benefits,” Kurnit told paidContent. “Almost all of them said, ‘Why wouldn’t we do 100 percent?’ to which we said… we think you will. So, the 15 percent number gave them the chance to make sure we were certified with all publishers and that the tech worked ‘as advertised.’ I expect them to ramp up quite quickly. You don’t tell brands like AT&T (NYSE: T) and Sears what they’re going to do — you give them the opportunity to do what’s in their best interest. Every ‘Keep’ is a good ‘Keep.’ Unlike a media buy that needs impressions, clicks, actions to pay back… a Keep button travels for free… and has lots of benefits even before the residual action in the Keeper.”

The entire service is free for all participants until August and then Adkeeper will start charging for use of its button. Kurnit points to Google’s and Twitter’s models of making sure the service achieves some scale first before instituting the ad model.

“First, we’re going to give [publishers] free use of the Keeping system for PromoKeeping,” Kurnit said. “The industry does a terrible job at this sort of thing. Just as Ford makes cars and markets them, publishers make sites and markets them — well, not so well. PromoKeeping is for things that take time, like signing up for newsletters, special content, e-commerce; that’s going to be a big deal for publishers… and, of course, good for us too… since it gets more KeepButtons into the marketplace.”

Among the other services Adkeeper is adding for publishers are “collections” and “adwalls,” tools to that will let ad sales staffs go into the company’s system and see what sort of ads match up with their direct sales. “These widgets will let their users come to the publishers’ co-branded Adwall within their sites,” Kurnit said. “It’s more use of advertising at no cost to the publisher. If they choose to pass on that value (and charge for it) to advertisers, they can make that call.”